What next for Linden Lab?

Massively has a few posts up about Cory Ondrejkas (Cory Linden) leaving Linden Lab. Cory is quoted as saying, “Philip and my visions for the future of Linden Lab are divergent enough that he decided to lead in his own way”.

In the comments, Prokofy Neva says, “I think the public should know what these "engineering differences" are, especially because we're still *on* this wild ride.” Nimrod jokes, “Prok something is wrong with me... I am agreeing with you!” Well, I’m in agreement with both of them, but I’d like to move the discussion even further.

I suspect that there are at least 11 million different views about the direction of Second Life. 1.5 million of those views have been thought about in the last sixty days and at any given point there is likely to be between 30 and 50 thousand such views.

From my perspective, a lot this has to do with the relationship between Linden Lab and the open source community. Version 0.5 of OpenSim should be coming out soon. I run an OpenSim grid on my home network. I’ve heard that there are plenty of OpenSim grids inside of IBM. Perhaps most importantly is the emergence of CentralGrid. CentralGrid is an alternative grid, based on OpenSim. They are busy coding enhancements to OpenSim to make it a viable alternative grid, that even the business community can get involved with, and they have attracted interest from many of the business groups in Second Life that I follow.

Of course, there are plenty of engineering differences within the OpenSim community as well. I believe that an extremely important part of the virtual world experience includes a well functioning currency. CentralGrid is working on that, but others in the OpenSim community seem to view currency as a distraction.

It clearly opens up lots of interesting issues. How well can you trust the currency of CentralGrid versus the currency of Linden Lab? How would currency work in a grid where anyone can add their own regions? What sort of interworld currency markets will exist?

There are plenty of additional issues that come as we start looking at a world of intergrids. How does communications take place? The OpenSim community has talked about using standard instant messaging protocols, so in theory you should be able to IM between grids, and outside to systems like Google Talk.

What about assets? That is a big issue. To the extent that an asset is portable between grids, it opens it up to much greater copying issues. I could copy an asset to a region where copy protection is disabled, make as many copies as I want and then flood the original grid with cheap knockoffs.

Another very interesting issue is how searches will work, as well as how SLURLs will work. Ideally, I would like to search for places, people and events across all the different grids. Who will handle these sorts of searches as well as the advertising for such searches.

It isn’t surprising to see Cory and Philip have engineering differences, either because of the changes going on with Second Life and other virtual worlds, or simply because of the dynamics of company growth. However, it does seem worthwhile to make these discussions, at least on the engineering side of things, as public as possible.

Aldon, just because my post on Massively.com was brief doesn't mean I left the discussion there, and I already moved it forward in two blog posts of my own this week on secondthoughts.com, and already addressed the very troublesome implications of Cory's remarks quoted on Intellectual Property Watch about DRM "getting in the way" and "slowing down" development.

The big question about open-source and reverse-engineered open sims is whether they protect IP and for that matter, land value.

And when I see that BNT is associated as a financial backer of a certain opensim project, I say to myself: "I will never go there." Why? Because I do not trust Intlibber Brautigan. Furthermore, even if I did, he would likely have pre-banned my Internet address or name or whatever. See how it works? This plethora of little sims that get started will be started by people with very big ideas about how they are going to be different and better than Linden Lab -- and also baggage from Second Life. I'm uninterested in their posturing. I want a world that already exists and has gone through all the birth pains.

I don't at all believe that if a sim is offered to me for only $750 and not $1695 that I will get the $1695 equivalent of service and content. Because I won't -- I get the server space, but I'd have to do all my own maintenance. Linden's costs aren't just about server space, but about access to their service and content.

Asset copying is the very biggest issue there is, next to holding land value itself in the world (something you likely don't care about, but will care about more if devaluing it makes the SL economy collapse). And that's surely among the issues about which Cory and Philip diverged, as I wrote.

Thanks for providing links to the ongoing discussion. There are a lot of important issues here and we need to keep exploring them.

Other people have been making a lot of similar comments as you about DRM issues, trying to understand the real value of property in Second Life, or related grids and the role of certain people's reputations in the value of such properties.